


Heroes of Another Story

by wisekrakens



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-02
Updated: 2013-06-02
Packaged: 2017-12-13 17:22:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/826848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wisekrakens/pseuds/wisekrakens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Atlantis Recon 4 comes into being in the conventional way: the Good Lady Elizabeth asketh and the Good Lady Elizabeth receiveth, because the Good Lord Sheppard maketh it so.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heroes of Another Story

**Author's Note:**

> IT LIIIIIIIIIIIIVES.  
> Finally, the adventures of AR 4 begin. Once again, I have popkin16 to thank for this, because if she hadn’t reminded me of its existence it would have languished in my fic folder forever more.  
> They have more to their story yet, and I’d love to tell it to whoever wants to listen. But you know how these things generally end: crushed to bits between the jaws of the great Procrastination Monster.

Atlantis Recon 4 comes into being in the conventional way: the Good Lady Elizabeth asketh and the Good Lady Elizabeth receiveth, because the Good Lord Sheppard maketh it so. It’s built around one Captain Ian Jacobsen, a Marine with a reputation for making decisions that skirt the line between acceptable and questionable but land often enough on the right side for their maker to be allowed out in the galaxy unsupervised. Captain Jacobsen snaps up Sergeant Mark Holloway, explosives enthusiast, after watching him teach a gaggle of Athosian kids about the wonders of football, and if he laughs himself to pieces later that night when he hears Holloway is one of those lucky few born with the Ancient gene, well, that’s between the captain and his pillow.

Team building is derailed, briefly, by the black energy monster of death. But only briefly, because while herding civilians away from the path of destruction Sergeant Holloway meets an Athosian named Aran who makes the Dalai Lama look impatient. Aran is really just a kid – he can’t be more than seventeen, Jesus mo’fucking Christ – but seventeen is old enough by Pegasus standards and, anyways, he doesn’t have parents to keep him from becoming AR 4’s guide.

It takes Captain Jacobsen nearly a week to choose a scientist; and their fourth member is going to be a scientist, because he’s read too many of SG 1’s mission reports to not have a geek along no matter if said geek has to be dragged by the scruff all over alien hill and dale. After careful consideration of the things Sheppard asked AR 4 to accomplish – get food, get tech, don’t die – Jacobsen narrows it down to the physicists and the engineers, because he remembers his sister espousing on the incredible usefulness of engineers and because the physicists sound smart. He approaches Doctor Penelope Lawrence, mechanical engineer, after watching her shoot out solution after solution amidst Ponytail Guy’s ego wrangling during the major’s Iratus bug incident and only make moves towards strangling him once.

She looks at him from behind her glasses that night at dinner, shifts her braid to the other shoulder, and says, “I’m shit with a gun.”

He walks her down to the range himself.

  


AR 4’s first mission is to a Teyla Planet. Aran is friends with the headman’s daughter, so negotiations run swiftly and smoothly and by the end of the afternoon Dr. Lawrence – “Penelope, please, it’s faster.” “Marginally.” “Fine, then, don’t.” – has shored up the village mill and Atlantis has a standing agreement of seven baskets of tuttle root per harvest in exchange for doctor visits of the medical kind. It’s not harvest, and Atlantis isn’t hungry just yet, so they return empty-handed but for a piece of paper with the headman’s signature.

Elizabeth requested. The headman thought it was weird.

  


AR 4’s second mission is not to a Teyla Planet. It’s to a planet the archaeologists found floating around in the database with naught but the word “interesting” attached to it.

“You’re kidding me, right?” Holloway says as they gear up. “Interesting?”

No one responds, because he’s been doing this since the briefing three hours ago.

“What the hell kind of description is interesting?”

Jacobsen leans over to tighten one of the straps on Penelope’s vest.

“Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?”

“Shut up, Holloway,” Jacobsen says.

“Yessir.”

Holloway bounces on the balls of his feet once, twice, because he’s twenty five and absolutely irrepressible.

“Hey, Doc,” he asks Penelope, “what d’you think we’ll find?”

She pauses in rearranging the instruments in the front pockets of her vest. “I don’t know,” she answers, and then glances up with a grin. “Something interesting?”

To absolutely no one’s surprise, Holloway and Penelope have spent the last two weeks becoming best friends because Penelope is twenty eight and absolutely irrepressible. For an engineer. For a British engineer, even.

There’s a rumor floating around that she can hold her liquor, too, although for someone who spent six years as a pretty girl in grad school that’s kind of a survival skill. Holloway plans to test this rumor as soon as he has enough alcohol.

They all make it out to the gate room in time for dial out, although how is anyone’s guess. Jacobsen suspects Athosian wizardry, and really, he wouldn’t put it past the kid. He’s just got one of those faces, y’know?

  


The planet, A4X-whatever-the-hell, is mostly forest.

“Sweet holy mother of god, is this entire galaxy forest?”

“Shut it, Holloway,” Jacobsen says, and gets a chipper _yessir_ in return.

“No,” Penelope answers the first question, settling her hat more firmly onto her head, “but the scientific reasons for gates mostly leading to forest planets are boring.”

“A scientist with a sense of audience. This is a momentous occurrence.”

“Shut it, Holloway.”

“Yessir.”

Jacobsen worries, sometimes, at the impression of Earth folk Aran is gathering from the other members of his team. But then he remembers “cut off from Earth” and “we’re all batshit, anyway” and decides to let it go.

  


“Hey, sir,” Holloway asks. He’s in the middle of helping Penelope balance over a log. “You were on a gate team at the SGC, right? What was that like?”

Jacobsen closes his eyes, briefly, at the sense memory of a snake crawling into the back of his head and wrapping itself around his spine. “Boring,” he answers, his voice as modulated as he can make it.

“Aw, come on, sir, it can’t have been that bad.”

“It was SG 13. We were pretty low down the totem pole.”

Holloway opens his mouth to say something else, but Aran asks a question about something he’d heard a scientist say and Penelope is off and running, wielding multisyllabic words like bricks to wall off that topic of conversation.

  


“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”

The corners of Aran’s mouth tick upwards ever so slightly at the sight of Holloway knee deep in a stream running out from under a glacier.

Jacobsen points ahead at the tower just visible above the tree line. “What do you think, sergeant?” he asks. “Interesting enough?”

Holloway snaps a smile. “Yessir.”

  


As they approach the base of the tower, Penelope flaps her hand at Holloway. “Stay there,” she says. “I want to get a look at this thing without your magic genes in the way.”

“So it’s Ancient, Doc?”

“Yes.”

And it is, although it’s not very good Ancient. It’s rusty, and short, and falling apart in half a dozen places. On a scale from Tesla to Janus, the tower scores about an Edison: direct and almost embarrassingly co-opted.

“Okay,” Penelope says when the scanner beeps twice in her hand.

“What’d it tell you?”

“Next to nothing,” she says. “Now step forwards.”

Holloway does, fingers beating a pattern on the end of his gun.

Nothing happens.

“What’d it tell you?”

“That this used to be a weather station.”

“So not interesting, then,” Aran says mildly. Jacobsen is the first to laugh.

  


They still force the door open to get inside, partly because they’re feeling suicidal and partly because Penelope is muttering under her breath about McKay “riding our asses about getting spare control crystals”.

“Doctor,” Captain Jacobsen asks the second time the beam of his flashlight falls across a rusted wall panel, “are you sure this place is safe?”

“Do you want the quickie answer or my exhaustive professional opinion?”

“The second one.”

“Sergeant, could you – yes, there, thank you. We’re fine, captain,” she says, ignoring her earlier name edict. She’d noticed early on that her captain tended to retreat to titles when he was nervous. “But I wouldn’t advise going upstairs. I’ve seen this alloy in the Milky Way and when it gets weathered like this,” she grunts as she pulls on a crystal, “it just can’t handle shear forces like it used to.”

“Meaning, doctor?”

“You would fall through the floor,” Aran answers softly, “but the building will not collapse, not yet. Was that correct, Penelope?”

“Because the support beams are largely under compression, yes.” Penelope stumbles backwards as her crystal comes free. “I’ll tell you what, though. I wouldn’t like to be here in a windstorm.”

On his next round, Jacobsen swings by the door and peers at the orange sky. Everyone else pretends not to notice.

  


Despite all predictions of doom, they make it back to Atlantis with a sack full of control crystals and only a couple pairs of wet socks.

In fact, excepting the unfortunate events of the Genii takeover (Holloway marks the storm as the real beginning of Sheppard’s cult of personality), AR 4’s fortunes are largely rosy. That is, until Penelope watches two of her colleagues die screaming and counts backwards through the hours to find that she’s got one, maybe two, left.

Her voice is small when she admits this over radio to Jacobsen, and his heart breaks a little before it freezes, because not. another. fucking. one. of his teammates. Not another alien plague, not another dictated will, not another death rattling out through the merciless static of radio waves.

“We’re gonna get you out of there, okay, Penelope?”

“No offense, captain.” Her laughter is short, strained. “But I didn’t know you were hiding a medical degree behind that commission. Or is it divinity?”

“Well, my dad was a preacher.”

“Oh?”

“He wasn’t very good, though. Public speaking.”

Her laughter is looser this time. “And so public speaking does make cowards of us all,” she says, and she lets her head loll back on the wall behind her.

“I wouldn’t say coward, exactly, but he wasn’t a Southern Baptist minister hiding in the skin of a five foot ten Norwegian Lutheran.”

“A what?”

“A – “ the captain dithers. “Which one?”

“Southern Baptist minister. I know what a Norwegian and a Lutheran are, captain.”

Captain Jacobsen takes a minute to think about this. “Holloway,” he calls instead, because they’re both in the mess courtesy of a training session gone late, though they’d picked different tables with different peers.

“You know Martin Luther King, Jr., Doc?” Holloway says, after flicking his radio from listen to talk. After the quarantine warning had come over the loudspeaker, everyone with someone on the survey had gone to their team or department channels. “I,” he starts, deepening his voice to a big, round bass and shaking it like the rattle is punctuation, “have a dream, that one day, the children of former slaves and the children of former slave owners will sit down in the red hills of Georgia at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream! Or something,” he finishes, going back to his mashed toba root. His tablemates hoot with laughter and break out in their own Martin Luther Kings.

Penelope’s answering laughter sounds real.

  


The first real break in their conversation comes half an hour later during Holloway’s reminiscing about his high school football team.

“Fuck,” Penelope says as shadows crawl across her vision. She’s so tense she thinks her neck might snap, but she’s not going to flip out and run off like that guy whose name she can’t be bothered to remember. No. She has enough pride left for that.

“What is it?” Aran asks softly. Everything he does is done softly, Penelope thinks crazily, like he’s scared of waking the family he doesn’t have. Like he’s hiding from the wraith that took them.

He’s sitting on his bed in his quarters right now, she knows, because he’d offered to do that Athosian death-is-upon-me ceremony for her, and because when he’d finally joined the team channel he’d apologized for not being able to find his radio after it had fallen off his bedside table. And she’s here, out on the ass-end of the city, hallucinating her brains out and waiting to die.

“I think I’ll take you up on that ceremony, Aran, if you don’t mind,” she says. Somehow her voice comes out steady. Must be the Londoner in it. It’s the kind of city that beats steel into your spine even if you’re only in it for a month.

She hears Aran nod, because his radio always scrapes over his hair when he nods. In the next room over, Rodney McKay is shouting about a generator.

  


Jacobsen and Holloway do her the favor of not interrupting the ceremony with their arguments or their platitudes, and that’s the best gesture of respect she could have ever asked for. After it’s over, the captain – “Ian. Might as well.” – speaks a half-remembered preacher blessing, and Holloway – “Fuck it. Mark. To all of you; I’ve been wanting to tell you for weeks.” – surprises everyone with a flawless Latin prayer for the dead.

“My mom was big on the church,” he offers up apologetically, but the engineer whose name Penelope will not deign to remember has broken into the mess and his body is lying on a table and there’s suddenly four people clamoring for whatever bastardized version of last rites Mark can give them.

“You know, Aran,” Penelope says as the Latin flows over their channel, “at dinner tonight, I was going to convince you to be my lab assistant.”

“I would have liked that very much,” he replies, and she’s not sure but she thinks he’s smiling.

  


Eleven people burst into tears when the EM pulse breaks over the city. Penelope is not one of them. She waits until she sees Aran’s small, sad, young face, until Mark’s gorilla arms are wrapped around her, until Ian finishes his blessing with a laying-on-of-hands and is standing guard three feet away, because no one sees their scientist cry.

  


AR 4’s sixth mission, launched three days later, is to a Teyla planet.


End file.
